


Like a Sea Without Shore

by idlesuperstar



Series: The Crooked Roads [11]
Category: Spooks | MI-5
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-09-24 07:34:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20354734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idlesuperstar/pseuds/idlesuperstar
Summary: Seven days off. Seven days of not having to pretend things don’t hurt.





	Like a Sea Without Shore

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place inbetween episodes 8.01 and 8.02
> 
> Title from William Blake's [To Thomas Butts ](https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/to-thomas-butts). 
> 
> Series notes are [here](http://archiveofourown.org/series/136827).

Lucas is lying in bed, weighing up the need to piss against the disinclination to move, when his phone buzzes.

He snakes a reluctant arm out from the duvet to check it.

A text from Ros.

_ You’re signed off sick for 7 days. Don’t argue. It’s already on the timesheet. _

And then, seconds later, another.

_ Check your email before you fuck off to Ibiza. _

He snorts, amused rather than disconcerted. Ros really does know him rather too well.

Seven days. What the _ fuck _is he going to do for seven days?

He drops his phone onto the duvet. Getting up to piss doesn’t seem much of a hardship now. He can go back to bed for a week if he likes.

~

Leaning against the kitchen counter while the kettle boils, he hikes up his t-shirt and peels the gauze on his stomach back gingerly. The repairs he’d done last night have held. The rip he’d felt was - luckily - skin, rather than a stitch. Lesser of two evils. He’d steri-stripped it back together and put a fresh dressing on.

One thing that distinguishes an agent from a civilian is the A&E grade first aid kit they keep at home. 

The kettle clicks off and - as if it’s wired to his nervous system - he slumps. Seven days off. Seven days of not having to pretend things don’t hurt. Of doing fuck all if he wants, and actually recovering. 

~

Sitting at the tiny table by the kitchen window with his tea and laptop, he obeys orders and checks his email.

There’s weak, hazy sunlight trying to break into the room. London is misty in the morning light. _ Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness. _It could be late summer, rather than October.

Lucas can’t for a moment think what Ros was referring to. He clicks through the usual civil service bumf. One about pension contributions, does he want to increase his. One about annual raises being frozen again, in line with inflation. An invite from a guy in Section B asking if he’d be up for joining their five-a-side footie team. They must be scraping the barrel, he thinks, asking him. 

He should deal with these, care about what they say, but he just deletes them all. 

Finally he finds it, masquerading under the subject line _ Annual Rotation, _ from a week ago. He scrolls through it. He’s due to move flats this month. Christ. 

He sits back. He’d not really thought about it, what with nuclear bombs, kidnapping, a snuff movie and the rest, but yeah, he supposes he’s due. He’d always - he thinks back - always moved in October, because he’d started in an October, and they rotated you based on that. 

Jesus, they’ve kept him on the same rotation. Did they send letters - and then emails - out, the eight years he was in Lubyanka? He wouldn’t be surprised. Bureaucracy at its finest. He wonders idly what poor sod had to go through his mail, all that time. 

Email is easier than paper, at least. There’s links to three flats for him to choose from. He clicks the first. Shit. It’s in a converted Victorian factory in Southwark. After yesterday, he’s not sure he wants to ever see a disused factory again. 

The second is a flat in a Georgian house in Highgate. He raises his eyebrows. That can’t be cheap. Five have probably owned it since time immemorial, before the first of the housing booms.

He browses the pictures. It’s nice, much nicer than his current flat. A bit far out, though. He likes being in walking distance of work, of the river. 

The third’s in a fancy new tower block up near Old Street. It looks brand new in the pictures, all clean lines and grey and white minimalism. Tasteful. 

He clicks back to the Southwark one. Ground floor, unlike his current four flights. New security outside and in. A fucking _ massive _ kitchen. He clicks through the pictures. It’s nice. Big bookshelves in the lounge. A decent sized bath. It looks modern without being uncomfortable. 

He looks round his tiny kitchen. Wonders - not for the first time - if this flat is Five’s equivalent of a halfway house. Used for the mistrusted, the disgraced, the possible-repeat-offenders, the out-of-favour. The just out of prison. 

These new flats look like ones you get when you’ve finally passed all the invisible tests set for you. 

_ Movers are available Wednesdays - Fridays if needed. Please advise if you require packers also. Please reply by _ \- shit that’s today, Lucas thinks. Sorry, Alison from HR. He leans back in his chair, feels the pain throb a tad brighter for a moment, the itch around his stitches. Feels - _ allows _ himself to feel - the bone deep weariness that one decent night’s sleep can’t touch. Fuck it, he thinks, and replies: _ Southwark, yes to movers, yes to packers. Will be away for the week, please let me know when new flat keys are available. _

A sudden urge to just go, no waiting. Looks around the place, at the overlooked mess of someone who’s barely been home. Fuck it, the packers can sort it all out. 

He gazes out of the window, finishing the last of his tea. The sky is brightening. Thinks - _ Brighton. _

* * *

Tempting though it is, he doesn’t just bolt for the station. He knows himself, knows he needs some prep, needs to pack properly, needs to sort the basics so he can stop thinking about them when he’s there. Knows he needs that small amount of control in order to relax.

_Biscuit tins full of sandwiches, a slowly warming bottle of made-up squash, his legs sticking to the vinyl seats of his dad’s Maxi. Some things are ingrained. He was a student before he realised service stations had more than just toilets. To Lucas’ parents they were somewhere you parked so you could eat your packed lunch._

So he googles Brighton hotels, books himself in. Checks train times from Victoria, the weather forecast. Runs through a quick list in his head of what he needs to take. As little as possible, he thinks. 

* * *

Four stops with a change on the tube with the rucksack he’s had since his student days. He half-wishes he’d walked to Victoria, except just hauling the pack onto his back had been painful enough. He stands gazing into space, pulled in on himself to avoid the jostling. This too shall pass. 

He thinks about the hordes swarming up and down underground escalators, flooding onto platforms and trains, packed tight, seething humanity. How two days ago they were marked for extinction and never knew it. 

Thinks of Connie saying, “It was me. It was me.”

~

The train from Victoria is delayed. It’s comforting in a way to find that Southwest Trains are still as shit as ever. But it’s near-empty when it finally arrives. He slings his pack under the table, braced to argue for his space. But no-one even gets on his carriage.

He likes trains. He likes the enforced inertia of travelling. A dynamic limbo. A state of being that lends itself to contemplation, to peace. 

Except today he’s not in the zone. He’s too aware of all the little irritants; the itch of his stitches, the headache behind his eyes that’s been there for days, the constant throb of pain in his side, the label of his t-shirt scratching his neck. The inescapable low drag of tiredness - dry, gritty eyes, grimy skin. Too aware of his bones and the meatsack weight of his body. 

The landscape flows past, indifferent.

* * *

Pride prompts him to walk to the hotel, instead of getting a cab. He’s fed up of being a wreck, and it’s only been two days. By the time he gets there he can feel the damp stink of his armpits, the sweat across his back. The girl on reception is professionally warm and friendly. Presumably she sees ruins of men on a daily basis. 

There is a lift, thank Christ there is a lift. He makes it to his room, shucks off everything - pack, jacket, boots - bar his boxers and spreads out on top of the cool, smooth duvet. Breathes. 

~

The room’s dark when he wakes, outside is glimmering into dusk. He’s cold and parched, but his headache has receded and his eyes are less sandy.

In the bathroom he downs three tiny glasses of water from the individually wrapped plastic cup and turns the shower on hot. The hotel is a little worn round the edges, Victorian splendour fading into out-of-fashion, but there’s fancy bottles in the shower. 

He lathers orange and bergamot into his hair and thinks about something they learnt in covert ops training. The little tricks you can do to help get undercover. Smell is powerful, underrated as a tool. Change your deodorant, your soap. Change what you use on your hair, your washing powder. Undercover works when your legend is as near to the truth as safely possible. You only need to step one pace to the side, and these changes will help put you there, standing alongside your real self. 

The shower gel is lemon and ginger. He smells utterly unlike himself. 

~

Outside the evening is darkening, cool, crisp; salt tang and seagull shrieks. He gets fish and chips and eats them walking along the pier, hot vinegary greasiness, perfect.

_ Fish and chips, _ he’d said, when Harry asked him what he wanted. 

Harry’s gaze heavy with guilt, with disgust, eyes pricking disapprovingly along his tattoos.

Only - recalibrate. 

See Harry not through the darkened glass of _ then, _smeared thick with mistrust, betrayal, anger, suspicion, humiliation. 

It _ was _ guilt, probably. But guilt for not getting him out sooner. For allowing the years to ink themselves onto his skin. 

And pity, perhaps. _ Pity, like a naked newborn babe. _ Or - more charitably - sympathy. Sympathy, even now, is easier to bear.

He sits on a bench, finishing his chips, fingers slippy with grease. The ocean’s roar a soothing heartbeat, the food warm and comforting. He feels grounded, at ease.

Layers of: gull shrieks, car engines, arcade machines, shouts, yells, laughter. 

Seaweed, briny and sour, fried onions, spilt lager, fag smoke, hot doughnuts.

Lights, lights everywhere; arcade and promenade, streetlights, pier neon, pub fronts, headlights, phone screens.

There is no choice but to be in the world. And to be in the world as it is; messy, loud, unpredictable, beautiful, dangerous, mundane, vivid, ever-changing.

And with that, he goes to the pub.

* * * 

His week goes like this.

He gets up for the latest breakfast he can, eats sausage egg and bacon, fried mushrooms. Toast that’s cold by the time he gets to it, thick butter and jam from fiddly packets. After the first day he has coffee instead of tea, because the tea is piss-weak. 

He takes a book but watches the world instead, outside and in. The courteous anonymity of hotel dining; a nod and a ‘morning’ and then blissfully left alone. 

After two days he stops checking the exits and looking up whenever someone comes in. He still assesses everyone; it’s second nature after all. But he does nothing with the information.

* * *

He’d brought _ Brighton Rock _ with him to read, aware of what a cliché it would seem, but not caring much. It’s been years since he read it, but he struggles now. It’s no less brilliant than it was, but he can’t face the seediness of it, the overwhelming stench of failure and fate that hangs over the characters. It’s too close to the bone. He doesn’t want it in his head. 

And - something he’d forgotten - the thick seam of Catholic guilt and anguish running through it seems histrionic, undermining the shades of grey seediness and moral ambiguity that feel authentic. Lucas doesn’t need religion to fuck him up, to make him analyse his motivations, his morality. Life, and the things people do and the work he does are enough to do that. 

_ Oleg _ was enough to do that, says the never-quite-silent whisper at the back of his mind.

So he browses the bookshops, looks through the dog-eared selections in the charity shops. Forgets any ideas of what he _ ought _ to be reading, what classics he has yet to get round to, what prize-winners he’s missed over the last few years, and picks out books by their covers, reading the first few pages until something catches. 

He sits in cafes, drinking mug after mug of tea, devouring pages until the world muffles itself, time disappearing. 

* * *

He walks - on his second afternoon - up the hill to the Booth Museum. Spends an hour amongst Victorian taxidermy, wondering at the peculiar confidence and curiosity that drove these men - Booth, Grant, Pitt-Rivers, Wellcome, and the rest - to collate, collect, catalogue, as if the wonders of their age could be pinned down, finite and understood.

Later in the week, on a day when the ache in his side is relentless, pitched too-strong, amplified by broken sleep, he walks through the town, down the narrow Lanes, ambling at a pace he normally would have no truck with. Browses around the vintage market, the tenacious ephemera of history. The collector’s urge, again. And amongst these shored-up fragments, happy jolts of nostalgia; a tobacco tin, a plastic robot, a comic, a set of plates, like well-loved snapshots in a family photo album.

* * *

In the mornings, he goes for proper walks; not along the pebbly beach, which jars his stitches on every uneven footfall, but along the coastline, easy treads on steady ground. He walks a little further every day, but doesn’t push himself. He left his running things at home on purpose.

At first he listens to music, new (old; new to him, eight years of things to catch up on,) albums by old favourites, waiting for the moment when they turn from strange echoes of the past to readable clear text, new pieces of feeling and time. 

_ You know that I have fallen further before _

_ I just cannot stand falling no more _

He chooses music over silence because it’s easier to not think when he has a soundtrack.

Later in the week, at the point when some songs sparkle, gem-like in his bloodstream, imprinting him forever

_ The only freedom that you’ll ever really know _

_ Is written in books from long ago _

he leaves his ipod behind, allows the silence in. 

Takes the bus far enough down the coast to walk some of the South Downs Way, along the Seven Sisters, high and seaswept and empty of people. 

Up there, atop the world where people take their unbearable tragedies, their long, wearying battles, he allows himself to stop fighting his thoughts. 

Gives himself up to the steady iambic rhythm of his feet on grass and smooth-worn stone, the harmony of his heartbeat, the sea-roll sway of his body; and so the scurrying river-swirls of feeling rush through him, unstoppable.

He looks out over the ocean as he walks, the crash and swell, thinks of Tilbury, of estuaries, of tributaries. Thinks of the water at the start of its journey, the _ starts _of its journey, from brooks, becks, streams, rivers, flowing faster and wider, mingling. 

For a while, he tries - with a wry nod to Booth, and his Victorian bretheren - to attribute people, events, to these different sources. Vieta was a river, once. She is a beck now, he thinks, ever more distant, ever smaller, sparkling and untroubled, the small rush of her water almost lost in the final ocean. Ruth is a brook, not distant in time, but flickering and disappearing in the great rush of all the other currents. Ben - but it’s impossible to categorise like this. Ben’s death, Connie’s treachery, Connie _ saving _them, they all carry their own weight, their own power, they all rush onward through him, buffeting, eroding, reshaping.

And Harry. What he’d thought Harry capable of, all these years. His own guilt, fast-flowing, mingling with what Harry’s asked of him, what the Service has asked of him. 

He stops walking, high on the cliff edge, looks out far over the ever-changing ocean to the horizon. 

Thinks back to the first time Oleg walked into his cell. To the second time, and the third, trying to pin down the exact moment this man changed from another faceless interrogator to - to _ Darsharvin. _ The brook running unnoticed and silent into a stream. Then to _ Oleg. _ And then… four, nearly five years later, and he still cannot put a name to it. Only knows the dark tug of the undercurrent, the relentless flow of the river, running through him like a coal seam, like an artery, like the hidden pathways in the ocean that only mariners can navigate. 

High up on the cliffs here, the ocean is infinite, the sky is endless.

_ Where I stand is only three miles from space _

His insignificance in this landscape is a relief, nature’s indifference a welcome absolution from troubles, responsibilities, from the messy parts of being human.

The horizon stretches away and he feels its vastness expanding into him, filling his lungs, opening his cramped ribcage, flowing along and outwards from his fingertips, his feet, his skull. He is _ Glad Day, Vitruvian Man. _He imagines his streams and rivers flowing out into the endless ocean beneath him, scurrying and branching, caught up, mingling, eddied away into new currents, swirling into dilution, until they are only sun-glints on wave crests, winking in and out of view. 

  


* * *

He goes to different pubs for the first few nights, more for variety than from restlessness. On the third or fourth evening, he’s in one that’s a modern version of an old man’s pub. It’s nice, the food is good, there’s no too-loud music to jar across his nerves. He sits in a room with a real fire, blazing hot, too hot really for the time of year. It’s lovely, though. He can’t bring himself to move. So he pulls off his jumper and sits in his t-shirt, sipping his pint, reading his book.

He’d packed his softest, oldest t-shirts, his scruffiest jumper, wanting the ease and comfort while his stitches healed. Wanting - he realises - clothes as far away from work as possible. 

He looks at his forearms, pinking in the heat of the fire, and wonders if his tattoos will draw attention, though there are more elaborate ones on display. Rubs his thumb idly over the dots of the quincunx. He forgets about them, all of them, all the time. His eyes no longer catch and jag on their edges. But he’s felt the pinprick of glances over his skin, has been extra careful to not react, to just sip his pint and turn another page. 

This is Brighton, how likely is it that there’s a Russian enclave here? And he’d been so very circumspect after all, that these visible ones could pass as harmless, once he got out. The odds of a Russian-speaking ex-con sitting at the next table are astronomical. He almost convinces himself.

Later - three pints later, when the thrum of tension has quieted, when his muscles are feeling pleasantly heavy and his edges are beginning to blur - he realises it’s a gay pub, and suddenly all the casual glances make sense. 

He’d been careful, like he always is, that his checking people out was quiet, unobtrusive. He scans the bar, still under the radar. Skims his eye over shoulders, bare forearms, singular tattoos; muscles shifting under clothes, lean thighs in skinny jeans. 

There’s no bright spark of lust, but there is a faint curl of warmth in his belly, a background electric hum. It’s...not _ new,_ exactly. But something so long dormant he thought it gone for good. 

He sips his pint and thinks about it, thinks about making his glances more deliberate, lingering. He won’t, he knows. Not this evening. Not with stitches healing and troubled sleep. But he _ could__,_ and that’s more than he expected. It feels like - like _ progress. _ Like a future exists.

* * *

His sleep is bad, at first. The nightmares are predictable; only their settings are new. He wakes, sweating, the butcher’s shop stench of blood still in the air. Connie, slicing Ben’s throat; Ruth, limp and blood-soaked; Vieta, screaming through radiation sickness; Harry, lifeless on a concrete floor.

Connie’s voice, echoing always. _ It was me. It was me. _

In the 3AM dark, the sounds of the town are smaller, more sporadic. It’s never silent, but it’s quieter, and darker, than London. 

The ocean is louder, bigger, all encompassing. The pebbles crunch like gunshots under his feet as he stumbles down towards the tide’s lapping edge.

_ Where the sea meets the moon-bleached land _

_ Listen! you hear the grating roar _

_ Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling _

_ At their return, up the high strand _

It’s cold, the wind cutting in around his edges, at his pulse points, neck and wrists, the fragile, mortal places. The moth’s-wing border between life and death. 

He thinks of the cold brightness of a knife point at his radial artery. Of the thick press of thumb on his carotid. Of falling. 

Of the steady rise and fall of breathing, close in his ear. Of danger, and safety, intertwined.

The ocean ebbs and flows, a steady heartbeat. 

He makes tea with the tiny kettle in his room, despite the shit uht milk. Reads himself back into sleep, hoping for better dreams. 

He buys gloves, a scarf. If he’s going to be wandering the beach in the witching hours, he wants to be warm. 

* * *

His last afternoon, he walks out along the coast on the same route he took the first morning. It’s unexpectedly warm, a late summer feel to the day. He’s left his coat at the hotel, carrying nothing but his phone and wallet, the sleeves of his jumper pushed up. A faint breeze, the sky an unblemished sheet of blue, clouds like a child’s drawing, high and white. 

He walks at a decent pace, moving easily, and it’s only when he notices the scenery is unfamiliar that he realises he’s walked twice as far as he did that first day. There’s no ache in his stomach muscles, no jolts of pain, no tug and strain on his stitches. No rank sweat or puddingy muscles. 

He feels unencumbered. There’s an airiness inside him - not just his lungs, his ribcage, his bones, but in his mind. He squints out over the picture postcard seascape before him, shading his eyes from the sun, and feels an ease he’d not realised he’d been missing.

* * *

Getting back into London seems to take half the time getting out did. He calls into the housing office to pick up his keys. The woman on the desk - Morag, he thinks her name is, been there decades - looks at him at first as if he’s Lazarus (he supposes the grapevine eventually reaches even here, when it comes to _ eight years in a Russian prison) _ and then - once she’s located his keys and directions - with thinly-veiled suspicion. He scrapes idly with his thumbnail at a bit of dried egg on his jumper (a casualty of breakfast) as she goes through his details, aware of his three-day stubble, his disreputably worn jeans, and offers his very best smile. It softens her expression from _ how the hell did you wangle this lovely flat? _ to _ poor thing must be straight off an undercover. _

* * *

The flat has a hushed calm about it, as if it’s waiting expectantly for its new life. He dumps his backpack, shrugs off his coat, and sets out to explore.

It’s something he’s always liked, moving flats. His student days - yearly moves from shitty terrace to shitty terrace - conditioned him for this kind of life. It’s strange though, to have left town and come back to everything invisibly sorted. It feels like cheating, somehow. Like he’s gone on another holiday.

He opens every drawer and cupboard in the kitchen, not to check for bugs - they’d not be so obvious - but because he just likes to know what’s in them. 

He doesn’t know if it was Ros who pulled strings (and if it _ was, _ she’ll never admit it) but all his stuff has been unpacked and put away. His paltry utensils are in a drawer, his utilitarian teatowels are hanging neatly on a hook.

He paces across the kitchen - his cell would fit into it exactly three times over - and heads into the lounge. His books, unboxed, stacked neatly on the floor ready to shelve. (_Don’t touch his books, he’s anal about them _ he imagines Ros saying to a quivering packer). 

CDs, DVDs, pictures - all neatly piled, ready to be worked on.

They’ve even - he checks the bedroom - made his bed for him. He feels coddled, princely. He grins. He’ll take it. It’s not like it’ll ever happen again.

He wanders back into the kitchen after a brief detour to the bathroom to check the bath _ is _ as big as it looked online, and has filled the kettle and switched it on before he thinks to check if he has tea. Someone - one of the invisible ones - has packed his half-full box of Yorkshire Tea and put fresh milk in the fridge. 

How the other half lives, as his mum used to say.

He gets a mug out of the cupboard - the _ mug cupboard - _and makes his tea. All his mugs are shit. Cheap supermarket ones, abandoned freebies. It looks like the office kitchen. He’ll go and buy new ones. It’ll be nice to have decent mugs. 

He sits on the understatedly classy sofa - comfy, no wonky springs or weird dip, plain grey fabric rather than bad 90s patterns - with the notebook and pen he dug out of his backpack and starts jotting a list. 

_ Good mugs _

_ Plates and bowls _

He looks around the room, assessing the potential of the blank walls.

_ New frames for Blakes - proper frame for Third Man poster _

He reaches over to the side table to pick up his mug, thinks about sitting here of an evening, over the winter, the nights drawing in.

_ Cushions _

_ Table lamp with decent reading light _

_ Duvet cover + sheets etc _ \- _ nice quality ones _

He drinks his tea, toes off his boots, puts his feet up on the coffee table. It’s his coffee table now. 

Pauses to think. 

_ Biscuits. _

* * *

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> [jennytheshipper](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Jennytheshipper/pseuds/Jennytheshipper) cast her beady eyes over this as usual. Shout out also to B who checked my Brighton memories for mistakes. 
> 
> I think I spent the second half of series seven saying 'Christ Lucas needs a break' after every episode, and this to me felt like a natural place to have him get a rest; a) he's been flipping _shot_, b) there's definitely a lighter mood all round in 8.02, c) at some point before 8.04 he must move flats. All of these things percolated in my brainpan and this fell out.
> 
> Lucas quotes [Dover Beach,](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43588/dover-beach) [To Autumn, ](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44484/to-autumn)and Macbeth, among other things. 
> 
> The books Lucas buys and reads are [The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Adventures_of_Kavalier_%26_Clay) by Michael Chabon and [ The Crimson Petal and the White](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crimson_Petal_and_the_White) by Michel Faber. Which, ironically, are both prize winners after all.
> 
> He listens to lots of albums, but mostly _Dear Catastrophe Waitress_ by Belle and Sebastian especially [If You Find Yourself Caught In Love](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de8OlR7G1xU&list=PLE6E311FBF41EC9D4&index=10) and [_Let it Come Down_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFHZx1Bqf0g&list=PLVPGzOHIIgz89L3PDa3Y7JZRiG51qYASh) by Spiritualized. 
> 
> Seven Sisters are just along from Beachy Head, which is sadly a notorious suicide spot. Lucas would very much know this. 
> 
> It’s also next to Birling Gap is where Atonement was partly filmed. Luckily for Lucas, both the book and the film came out while he was in prison, so he hasn’t had to suffer them. (NOT a fan of Ian McEwan and his shrivelled up middle class white man’s walnut of a heart).


End file.
